Pocketbook Patriotism?

Google Trends #3 on May 20th - "How Americans Can Buy American".

Main story tied into the Google Search: The resurgence of 'pocketbook patriotism': Food scares, toy safety, unionism all contribute to Made in U.S.A. movement

These type of stories continue to come out and are loved by fluffy journalists who understand neither economics nor consumer psychology. They generally revolve around an enterprising journalist interviewing a couple of people who want to buy "American" or "local" or whatever and then follow it up with some "facts" about how the foreigners are A) stealing all the jobs, B) trying to poison the children and/or pets and C) how manufacturing is the lifeblood of western civilization (especially popular in Canadian media stories about car production in Ontario).

The MSNBC link above is a great example of main stream media (MSM) pandering:

"(scares) involving imported goods served as a wake-up call that a surprising number of the products... are made in China, India, Bangladesh, Mexico and other far-off places."

OK - China for sure, India is more call-centrey than manufacturing, Bangladesh exports clothes and leather, not so much food and Mexico is "a far-off place'? Five sentences in and this journalist is already going to the "far-off foreigners" card.

Cue the xenophobes.

"(for) Barbara Toncheff, the news was an affirmation of her difficult and often frustrating quest to fill her house with items made in the United States. œI was raised to support your country,” Toncheff said recently. œJuly Fourth should truly mean independence. We shouldn™t become dependent on the rest of the world.”

Uh no, Independence Day is to celebrate independence as a country from Britain, not a day to say "we should become completely isolated and insular", which is not even theoretically possible.

All we need now is a passing reference to Sept 11 which has nothing to do with anything. Oh wait.

While events like last year™s import scares and the 9/11 terrorist attacks may occasionally prompt Americans to look more closely at labels

Yeah. Thanks for that, everyone has stopped buying what the Saudis are selling. But to finish it off lets get some more info on the fallacy that manufacturing a product in the country in which is consumed will allow to keep "more money" inside the country.

American-made items, they believe, are more likely to be safer and higher in quality. They say buying American is better for the country because it keeps jobs and money within our borders.

Sweet - "they say". This is like a colour (yeah see how I used the extra letter? I must be one of those damn foreigners, or perhaps an anglophile living in New England) by numbers instruction guide on how to write the fluffiest article known to man.

It is just chock full of gems like this:

Henry Paciullo isn™t the type of guy who tends to shop much, so he didn™t even really notice the trend toward imported goods until about four years ago

Yeah, hate that. You don't go shopping for oh, 30 years, and then there is all these damn foreign products clogging up the shelves. Henry there just wanted to purchase an auto-gyro ticket to Siam, but all those "non American" products just kept spitting in his face.

But as the story highlight, the journo thinks - let us link "buying American" to supporting unions, being against slave labor (slaves? really?), and the current go-to boogeyman global warming:

Skybetter, who is in her 40s, began a more serious commitment to buying domestic products a couple years ago after she started to see the effects outsourcing seemed to be having on America™s middle class. œI decided, I can™t change the world, but I can, at least with my money, decide where I want my dollars to go, and I don™t want my dollars to go for slave labor. I don™t want my dollars to contribute to global warming,”

A couple years ago? Middle class hurting? What planet was this Skybetter on? Tatooine maybe, because on Earth the middle class of the US had been doing well until the sub-prime credit crunch stopped home prices from appreciating double digits per year and somewhat restricted consumer spending. But housing can't be blamed on the foreigners, soooo that is not very interesting.

This type of article is so popular because it transcends the typical right/left divide in the US. Fly-over Americans who live in Red states can feel good about buying American because it 1) will show those damn foreigners, 2) help keep jobs in the US and 3) is patriotic. Argula eating Blue staters can be pleased that buying American can reduce dependence on foreign oil, help stop child/slave labour, and halt global warming in its tracks. It is a win-win for fluffy MSM journalists.